Category Archives: Blog Stuff

I'm going to BlogHer

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Last week I made the decision to go to BlogHer. Well, I didn’t make the decision on my own, Dave is actively encouraging me to go, which kind of surprised me. I hemmed and hawed for a while. I mean, sure, I want to go, it sounds like a lot of fun. But it means 3 nights away from Catie, which is more than I’ve ever done (so far, I’ve spent a grand total of one night away from her. ONE! In her whole life!). Plus it’s expensive, paying for a plane ticket, hotel, conference pass, etc. And it’s scary to think about meeting some of the bloggers who I’ve been reading for years. I’m a little scared that it’s going to trigger some sort of high school flashback and I’ll be sitting by myself while all the cool kids party it up. (And yes, I do realize exactly how ridiculous I am for thinking that.)

But here’s the thing. Most of my job-hunting is turning up zilch, so in the meantime, I’ve started doing a little bit of freelance writing. And I love it. So if I really want to market myself as a freelance writer and blogger (and I think that I do), then it makes sense to go to a conference to learn more about the business side of blogging. Right? Honestly, I’m really looking forward to that side of it. I imagine that I’ll learn a lot.

Of course, there are a ton of bloggers who I would absolutely love to meet in person: Heather, Yvonne, Jodi, etc. I’m going to be totally overwhelmed by the Genius and Awesomeness. And there are also the rock star bloggers (you know who they are) who I will try really hard not to squee or pee my pants if I should happen to get the chance to meet them. But let’s face it, I’m a huge dork, anything could happen.

So I bought the conference pass, and I booked my plane ticket with frequent flyer miles (thank you, American Airlines!). All that’s left is the hotel. Which brings me to my main point: if anybody who reads this site is also going to BlogHer, and if you want a roommate to go halvsies on a hotel room with you, leave me a comment or drop me an email. (Um, women only, please. I don’t need to go getting myself into trouble with my husband.) I sort of love the idea of having a hotel room to myself for three whole nights with no one (read: Catie) to interrupt my sleep, but they’re hosting BlogHer at the Sheraton, and it’s kind of expensive.

Also: holy mother of God, I can’t believe I’m actually going. Only almost-5 months left to freak out about it!

playdates and sickies

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I’m not sure what happened to my blog yesterday, but between two online chats with tech support and some major repairs, apparently all is well now. Annoying, but not fatal. Meh.

Yesterday, Catie and I went to Marbles Kids’ Museum, which is always fun. The problem is that downtown Raleigh is quite a hike from us, and with Catie’s tendency to get carsick… well. It wasn’t that bad, I had a change of clothes with us, and she seemed to feel a lot better after she barfed, so I just got her cleaned up and sent her off to play. She had a blast.

happy girl on her horsey

I love this b/c even though she's looking down, you can tell how happy she is

Or rather, they had fun until my friend Kimberly’s mother-in-law tried to get a picture with both Morgan (Kimberly’s daughter) and Catie at the same time. Catie had been so caught up with all of the toys and activities that she hadn’t noticed Morgan’s grandma up until the moment she grabbed her. And, um, Catie was not having it.

Morgan's grandma came over for a group pic. Catie was NOT having it.

I know it’s sick and evil of me, but that picture cracks me up. Besides, a few minutes later, all was well with the world.

playing happily again, after the whole "someone else's grandma hugged me" incident

On our way home from Marbles, I noticed that my throat felt a little scratchy. Dave’s been sick for the past few days, so I worried that I was coming down with it. As soon as we got home, I downed some Zicam and an Emergen-C to try to fight it off. I was supposed to play bunco with some of the neighborhood ladies last night, but I canceled on them since I wasn’t feeling great, plus Dave was miserable and Catie had an asthma attack that afternoon (nothing major, she’d just been running around outside in the cold weather too much), so I was worried about leaving them.

I was in bed by 9:30, and woke up this morning to realize that yes, I have indeed caught the plague. Yuck. I don’t mind suffering through it myself, I’m just worried that Catie will catch it. And since her colds tend to lead to major asthma issues and worse (i.e., hospital visits), I’m doing everything I can to keep her safe. Even trying to limit kisses, which is basically impossible. Cross your fingers that Dave and I keep the germs to ourselves. I’d like for 2009 to be free of trips to the pediatric ER, if at all possible.

tweeting

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I finally signed up for a Twitter account. I’ve been meaning to do it for ages, but I thought that since my parents are coming tomorrow, and I really need to be cleaning the house, why not procrastinate and set myself up with yet another web application that I probably don’t really need? Yeah.

You can go see my Twitter page here, and my most recent tweets will be over there on my sidebar. There’s nothing interesting so far, but it occurred to me that when I’m stuck places with just my cell phone (like oh, I don’t know, the pediatric emergency room), it might be handy to have a way to communicate.

Alright, now I’m going to clean. Really, I am.

minor update

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So, my little blog tagline has been bugging me for a while. In case y’all never noticed, it said:

“The rambling thoughts of a nerdy Southern girl living in the Pacific Northwest. Trying to figure out this whole life, mommy, wife and career thing. Giddy-up.”

I’ve been trying to figure out how to change it since we aren’t in the Pacific Northwest anymore. All I could come up with was “the rambling thoughts of a nerdy Southern girl who’s living in the South.” And that sounded truly, completely boring.

So if you look over to the right there, you can see the new version. I might change it again if inspiration strikes, I haven’t decided yet.

the winner (for now)

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I chose the peekaboo picture for the sidebar – if you don’t see it, you might need to refresh your browser. I do really love that laugh that she’s doing. The only thing that bugged me about the other picture (um, #1 in the top 3, if that makes sense) is that there was a window between our heads, and it was kind of an odd bright spot in the middle of the photo. I do think that I looked better in that picture, which really should be all that matters (ha ha), but I think this one is a funnier picture of Cate, and I like the sort of smeary effects around the edges (which was a total accident). Hopefully I can stand to see my weird neck angle on this picture for a while.

Of course, I’m going to be seeing my sister next month, who’s responsible for almost every really good picture of me and Cate ever taken (like this one, and this one… and also this one), so I’ll probably soon have a super-fabulous picture that I’ll end up using on the sidebar instead of this one.

And speaking of my sister, the first thing that both she and my mom told me upon seeing these pictures is that I am apparently in desperate need of a good eyebrow-waxing. I love my family.

Meanwhile, just to brighten up your Monday, here’s a video I took yesterday of Cate and Beaumont playing in the front yard.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zEqHmSugxS4

You might think that she’s saying “hi” and running toward me at the beginning of the video, but no, it’s all about the cat. Of course.

my mini-vanity project

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It recently occurred to me that the little “Favorite Picture” over there in the sidebar is from Christmas, and cute as it is, Cate looks nothing like that now. So I decided it was time to update the picture, and I’ve been trying to get a good picture of Cate and me this weekend. None of the pictures we took yesterday really worked at all, because I think I look weird in almost all of them.

the first attempt at getting a new pic of us

Something about my makeup was too harsh. Also, if you have dark hair, you probably shouldn’t wear a black shirt in photos, because you just look like a pasty disembodied head. As for Cate, she was just not in the mood to look at the camera. And when she did, well…

Cate does her best "blue steel"

Apparently she’s been watching Zoolander without our knowledge, because she’s clearly giving us her best “Blue Steel.”

Today we had a few better results:

camera? mine?

“Oh hai! I can has camera?”

As for me, I took notes from yesterday and tried to soften up the makeup a little (note to self: start doing that every day, because some of those pictures from yesterday were SCARY) and wore a blue shirt so there’s no way it would blend in with my hair.

These are my top three:

Mama and Cate

This one cracks me up because we were both genuinely laughing. I just wish you could see her pretty eyes.

playing peekaboo over my shoulder

The angle of my head looks kind of strange, but I love it when she gets behind me and plays peekaboo over my shoulder, which is what she was doing here.

I like this one

I love this because you can see her pretty blue eyes and her hair looks adorable (check out those curls!), I just wish she had been smiling.

I don’t know, what do y’all think? Any favorites?

weird sleep cycles

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Cate seems to have gotten herself into a bizarre sleep cycle and I don’t know how to break it. Her schedule used to go like this:

8 a.m. – wake up
Noon-ish: nap for a couple of hours
9 p.m. – go to sleep for the night

That was lovely and totally worked for us. But it seems that since she’s started walking, she’s exerting a lot more energy, so now it’s more like this:

7 a.m. – wake up and play-play-walk-walk-play
10 a.m. – sack out for a nap because DUDE, that was a lotta hard playing
4 p.m. – fall asleep for a second nap because all that playing since the first nap? Exhausting!
10:30 p.m. – sleep? Who needs sleep? I’ve had two naps today, I’m not sleepy at all!
7 a.m. – wake up because now it’s a habit, even though I’m still tired, and I will totally crash in 3 hours

So how on earth do I get her back to a normal one-nap-per-day schedule? I’ve tried only letting her sleep for 15-20 minutes for the second nap, in the hopes that she’ll still be tired enough to go to bed at a reasonable time. It doesn’t really seem to work, though. Any ideas?

Meanwhile, what’s cuter than a baby walking around in nothing but a diaper? Nothing, I say!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Yk6TfEr__s

Things I love about this video:
1. Chubby legs in motion.
2. That she says “uh-oh!” when she first sees her xylophone. As in, “uh-oh, here’s a toy that needs playing with!” And then she proceeds to beat the crap out of it with the wrong end of the stick.
3. That she does the “wave bye-bye” hand motion even though she isn’t actually waving bye-bye at anything. We’ve just been trying to teach her that one, so now she does it all the time.
4. The laugh she does when we play peekaboo on opposite sides of the door. She sounds sort of like a machine gun, and it cracks me up every time.

(A couple more videos here for those who are interested.)